Mango Tech sells two software products to Qualcomm

BANGALORE: In a sign that India's software product space is coming of age, a small Bangalore start-up — Mango Technologies — has sold two of its software products to Qualcomm, one of the world's largest wireless semiconductor companies.

Sunil Maheshwari, the 35-year-old CEO and founder of the company, declined to specify the value of the deal, only revealing that it was a multi-million dollar one. Mango was founded in July 2006 by Maheshwari, who had previously worked in companies like Tektronix, Pixtel and Quasar Innovations, and Lekh Joshi (33), who had previously worked with Motorola, Kyocera and Quasar. As part of the transaction, Qualcomm received a mobile handset user interface (UI) software and a PC-based UI customisation tool kit from Mango.

Software products made in India are beginning to find their way into global end-products through licensing arrangements, but this is a rare instance of a company being able to sell its products to a global giant. Maheshwari compared this to Google buying the Android operating system from a start-up. ‘‘Mango would have found it difficult to scale the products' usage. Qualcomm, with its enormous reach among handset makers and operators around the world, would be able to scale it quickly,'' Maheshwari said. And given Qualcomm's desire to scale the product, it would have been a risk for it to have a licensing arrangement with Mango.

Mango, which TOI had featured in December 2008 as a promising start-up, had developed an application framework for low- and mid-tier mobile handsets.